Sun, Oct. 7 | 11:00 am | 90 minutes

Worst of Times

Lauren Groff is the Times best-selling author of the novels “The Monsters of Templeton,” “Arcadia,” and “Fates and Furies,” which was a finalist for the National Book Award. She has also published the story collections “Delicate Edible Birds” and “Florida,” which was released earlier this year. She was recently named a Guggenheim Fellow and included in Granta’s “Best of Young American Novelists 3” issue, and her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, and The Atlantic, and has been anthologized in “The O. Henry Prize Stories” and multiple editions of “The Best American Short Stories.”

Rachel Kushner is the Times best-selling author of the novels “Telex from Cuba” and “The Flamethrowers,” which was named one of the Times’ ten best books of 2013, and of “The Strange Case of Rachel K,” a book of her collected early work. She was a 2013 Guggenheim Fellow and has twice been a finalist for a National Book Award. In 2016, she received the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her newest novel, “The Mars Room,” published in May, 2018, was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize. “Life Sentences,” Dana Goodyear’s Profile of her, appeared in the April 30, 2018, issue of The New Yorker.

Tommy Orange’s début novel, “There There,” was published in June, 2018. A member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes of Oklahoma, he is the recipient of a 2014 MacDowell Fellowship and a graduate of the M.F.A. program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. His short story “The State” appeared in the March 26, 2018, issue of The New Yorker.